


but what remians

by Rayellah



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 01:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6494692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rayellah/pseuds/Rayellah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How guilty are you, when it was your hands doing the damage, but not your will?</p>
            </blockquote>





	but what remians

1.

It’s like an endless, inevitable march downwards, something pressed cold over your nose and mouth, clouding your eyes, dampening your thoughts, and all you can do is stumble forward in the dark and _trust;_  trust this hate and this thirst for vengeance that aren’t yours, these empty spaces that aren’t yours, sensations of being hunted that aren’t yours, open wounds that belong to someone else, and this spirit you never willingly invited inside.

Your heart beats too hot and full of blood.

 

2.

You don’t remember if you were always this desperate for your own identity. It feels like you were. Like you were a buried landmine, just waiting for _him_ to trip across it.

And yet, you’re directionless without him. Purposeless. Surely that isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

A part of you misses him, even after everything. A part of you aches, even though you know it shouldn’t. A part of you feels empty, like a knife to the chest. Or rather: like the space where a knife could be, but isn’t, anymore, and _surely_ it must be better now, there’s not _supposed_ to be a knife there. But now it just feels like the lack of something. You feel the space like an ache.

You should _hate_ him.

Sometimes you do.

But sometimes—sometimes you only consider it.

 

3.

A terrible and monstrous thing had its hands clamped around you, your soul or your bones or something more and less tangible than both of those things.

 

4.

You heard, once, or maybe _read_ , that when you’re lost in the desert, dying of thirst, you should suck on a stone. It puts moisture in your mouth, tricks your body into thinking you’ve found water. Keeps you going until you get… until you get… well, until you get _somewhere._ Wherever it is that you’re going.

You spend the longer nights playing the games you once enjoyed, losing money you don’t have to friends who won’t collect. You feel spare and thin and raw and _home_ , for as long as the games can last.

You never had many friends, but you’ve managed to keep a few. Even if you didn’t hold onto them on purpose, it was, apparently, enough.

It's difficult not to appreciate their presence. Even if they won't-don't-can't understand.

 

5.

Under the spirit's control, hours, entire days, would blink away like huffed-out candles.

 

6.

You used to feel like a corpse, and thought you might as well be one, for all the good you did anyone, no matter how hard you tried. With your longings and your weakness and your limited human understanding of concepts like love and revenge and the end of the world. There were friends who drove you to turn on the spirit sometimes, a group of determined kids with too much faith in you who seemed unwilling to let you just be a lost cause.

The spirit wanted them gone. You didn’t. It became a point of contention for as long as you had the strength to _contest_ a thing.

 

7.

You and the spirit have lied for as long as you can remember him being there, and if your friends knew the full extent, if they’d _listen_ , they’d understand. They would have given up on you long ago. Even now, without the spirit with you, you still sense some remnant of his will, or his hate, or his desperation. Or his… something. He left something behind in you.

Whatever it is that he left, it slithers between your skull and your scalp, whispering. It feels like more than a memory and less than a presence.

 

8.

You have a lot of guilt. And guilt is a funny thing. It’s swallowing a white-hot scrap of iron and discovering too late how something hot and burning can bury itself in the lining of your stomach.

How guilty are you, when it was your hands doing the damage, but not your _will_? And does the guilt make it better or worse? You never feel the ache that is your lack of solid identity more than when the guilt wells up. When every second feels like a police interrogation, being asked if this is your first offense, and you have to wonder which one was the _first_ offense? Was it the things you did or the things you couldn't stop someone else from doing? Would it have been any more or less your fault of the spirit had used someone else's hands?

 

9.

His plan waits for no one, and you _will_ help him complete it. Wan, sick, wild-eyed, and dusted with the ashes of all the things it won’t matter that you wanted to save. Selfish, to want more; to refuse to let him do what he wants with you. He is just a spirit. Why is it _so_ difficult for you to be just a body?

 

10.

You fight a monster for years and years.

You lose.


End file.
